(Applause Books). Harpagon, the most desperate, scheming miser in literature, starves his servants, declines to pay them, cheats his own children if he can save (or make) a few coins, and when his hoard of gold disappears, insanely accuses himself of being the thief. Dandin, in this rousing classic, not previously available in English for sixty years, is a man in a plight that everybody but him will find entertaining.

In one of Moliere's most popular plays, Scapin, that monarch of con men, puts his store of ingenuity to work, getting two lovesick young men married to the girls they pine for and, along the way, taking revenge on their grasping old fathers. Closed down after its first, highly successful run because of opposition from powerful enemies of the playwright, Don Juan was performed in a bowdlerized version for almost two hundred years, until actors, directors and critics restored the original text, recognizing it as the most ambitious and mightiest of Moliere's prose plays. Bermel's translations of...